The Dirt Peddler (23 page)

I could see his mind working in the narrowing of his eyes.

“Yes,” he said, slowly.

“Did you know it was about New Eden?”

I was taking a real chance here, since I didn't know positively that it was.

“You can't be serious!” I could sense a slight cracking of his facade of composure.

“I'm afraid I am.”

He sat there silently for a moment as the cracks repaired themselves.

“Then you're saying that Randy was not in his car by accident.”

I overlooked the unintentional pun.

“I don't think so. I think Randy had been supplying Tunderew with information on New Eden, the Eternal Light Foundation, and…” I hesitated only briefly, “…you.”

That
one got to him, I could tell. He did his best to hide it, but failed.

“I don't believe it. It's impossible.” For an instant there, his entire body sagged as he realized that it was indeed possible.

He cleared his throat before speaking.

“Who else knows? And for whom are you working?”

“I'm not working for anyone. Randy was a friend of…a friend. By total coincidence, Tunderew had hired me to find out who was trying to blackmail him for allegedly being gay. It wasn't really until Randy had left New Eden and I found out about your…relationship…with him that I really started putting two and two together. I don't believe Tunderew's death was an accident. I think someone killed him…and Randy had the incredibly bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's because of Randy that I'm doing whatever I can to find out exactly what happened.”

“And you actually believe New Eden…
I
…am involved somehow? That's preposterous!”

I noticed that his face did not reflect the same certainty as his voice.

“I'm not ruling anyone or anything either in or out. There are other leads I'm following, but there are just too many arrows pointing in the direction of New Eden to ignore.”

I could read the suspicion in his eyes, and I suppose I couldn't really blame him. He had no way of knowing I wasn't out to screw him (which I'm sure my crotch would have thought was a great idea). In an effort to reassure him that was not the case, I said, “My only concern in all this is to find out who is responsible for Randy's death. I share your sentiments on muckrakers, and I found Tony Tunderew to be a thoroughly despicable human being.”

We sat for another moment in silence as he was lost in his own thoughts and I tried to sort out mine.

Finally, in an attempt to satisfy myself on the point, I asked, “You're sure, then, that you had no idea Tunderew was targeting you and New Eden?”

I turned my vibes detection systems on full and zeroed all my attention on his face and body language.

Zilch.

His head moved slowly back and forth.

“None, I swear. I admit that I had a moment of weakness with Randy, but I can't see how just one unfortunate incident of moral lapse on my part could be fuel for an entire book.”

Well, now there's an interesting comment on several levels,
I thought.
“One unfortunate incident”? Not the way I hear it.

I doubled the intensity of my alertness to his reactions when I said, “Well, there were the other deaths…”

He looked at me sharply.

“
Deaths?
If you're referring to Michael Barber, I take full responsibility for my failure to prevent what happened to him. But I watched him get on the bus! And though there was no possible way I could have anticipated what happened to him, there has not been a single day since that I have not wished I had waited until the bus drove off to be absolutely sure…”

“You can't blame yourself.” I wondered if that was a true statement.

Again the shake of the head. “But I do. I do.”

For a moment there, I almost felt sorry for the guy.

“And what about James Temple?”

He looked puzzled again.

“Who?”

“James Temple, one of the early residents of the Atlanta New Eden.”

His eyes narrowed slightly, whether in suspicion or in thought I couldn't tell.

“James Temple. Ja…
Jim
Temple…” he said after a moment. “What about him? How do you know Jim?”

“He's dead, too. He was murdered, just about the time he left New Eden.”

Either Jeffrey Dinsmore was one of the world's greatest actors, or what I was telling him was coming as a complete surprise and an almost physical shock. His facade of ministerial control collapsed totally…but only for a moment, and then the walls were back up.

“You're wrong. Jim's not dead. He left. All our residents leave eventually; that's part of New Eden's purpose, to give them a fresh start in life. Surely I'd have known if something had happened to him.”

“His body wasn't discovered until just recently, on the banks of the Chattahoochee about halfway between Atlanta and New Eden.”

I think “lost” best sums up the look on Dinsmore's face.

“No,” he said, as if saying it would bring James Temple back to life. “No. He…”

Watching someone in total control of himself lose that control is not a pleasant sight. In order to prevent him from swirling more quickly into total confusion, I tried to arrest it with another question.

“Do you have any idea why Temple left?”

He shook his head. “None. I thought he really liked it at New Eden, and he seemed to be doing well. Then we—my wife and I—returned from a religious conference, and he was gone. It's not at all unusual for a resident to simply leave without notice, but that Jim would do it was a real surprise.”

“And you never heard from him again?”

He looked quickly away and said, “No.”

“I'm sorry?” I said, staring at him. He looked at me and again I saw a lightning-quick flush.

“I mean, yes, I did. About six weeks after he left I got a small package from him.”

“May I ask what was in it?”

And again the flush, longer this time. “It was…it was a small Bible I'd given him…in gratitude for his being such a good worker,” he hastily added. He paused, and I knew there was something else.

“And?” I prompted.

“And it was torn into shreds.” He shook his head. “I have no idea why he would have done such a thing. There was no note of explanation, nothing. It's a total mystery.”

Why didn't I think so? But rather than pursue it further at the moment, I decided to move on.

“Temple worked in the residence office, is that right?”

He gathered himself together and looked at me. “Yes, that's right. All our residents have specific work assignments.”

“And did Barber by any chance also work in the residence office?”

“We have several offices at each facility.” I could sense both a realization on his part and an effort to evade it. “There's the administration office, the farm office, and the residence office.”

“But like Randy, they all worked in the residence office, didn't they?”

I could swear I saw him pale.

“Well, yes,” he said finally.

“And what about a Denny Rechter. Did he work in the residence office, too?”

“Denny?” he asked, then his eyes widened noticeably. “Are you saying Denny's dead, too? That's impossible! Totally impossible!”

“I hope you're right,” I said. “So far, Denny Rechter has only officially been reported as missing. But did he work in the residence office?”

“For a brief while, yes. But one morning he didn't show up for work and Mel Hooper, our Residents' Administrator, said the police had contacted him in regards to Denny's parents being in town looking for him. Apparently he'd been a runaway, and he ran again when he somehow heard his folks were coming to take him home.” He shrugged. I could clearly sense there was a lot going on inside that he didn't want to let out.

I did want to know more about exactly how New Eden operated, but not right now. I had more pressing matters on my mind.

“May I ask if you were…involved…with all four at some point?”

“Involved? What are you implying?”

He tried to sound shocked, but I could see he knew it wouldn't work.

“No! Of course not!” he said adamantly—but as far as I was concerned, certainly not convincingly. “I love my wife…”

I held up my hand to forestall the anticipated outpouring of denial.

“I'm sure you do. But that really isn't relevant to whether or not you were…if ‘involved' isn't accurate, let's substitute ‘sexually active'…with James Temple, Michael Barber, and Denny Rechter as well as with Randy Jacobs.”

I think if he thought anger might do him any good, he'd have registered it more visibly. I could see it was there, but he also knew there wasn't much point in displaying it. And while there was also little point in denying he'd had sex with Randy—and I questioned as to whether it may not have been more than once—he wasn't about to admit to any more than he had to.

“No! Absolutely not! Randy was…well…he pretty much seduced me, that's what he did. I'm only human, and my wife was traveling much of the time, and…”

I held up my hand again. “Please, Reverend, your sexual orientation would be none of my business except for the fact that as a one-hundred-percent gay man, I tend to get extremely defensive when other gay men end up dead for whatever reason.”

He simply stared at me.

“What does your wife think about your being…only human?”

He dropped his glance to the floor. “I assume Randy told you she…she…”

“Caught you in the act?”

“Exactly. It was terrible. You have no idea how shocked and horrified she was. But my wife is about as close to being a saint as it is possible for a human being to be. I explained exactly what had happened and why, and she forgave me. I swore to her that it would never happen again.”

I'm sure you did,
I thought.
And I'm sure she believed you.

I decided to get back to who might have killed Tony Tunderew.

“Well, you're right that a one-time experience with a single male hustler wouldn't be enough on which to build a best-selling exposé. But the disappearance of one and the verifiable deaths of two”—I wasn't counting Randy's peripheral death—“male hustlers who all worked in the residence office of a respected and well-known religious conservative would understandably run up red flags. Especially for someone like Tunderew. I wouldn't even rule out the possibility that Tunderew used Randy to set you up. But if that was the case, he just set the trap—you took the bait. And the fact of the matter is that there's nothing like a juicy sex scandal—with hints of murder—to sell a very large number of books.”

Dinsmore was looking more and more distressed.

“
Is
there a second book? I mean, was this Tunderew fellow just in the
process
of writing it, or did he finish it? A book like that could destroy everything my wife and I have worked for all these years! Everything! We can't let that happen.”

Luckily for him, I don't think he realized he'd just voiced a very probable motive for Tony T. Tunderew's murder. But I figured he deserved to know what he was up against.

“As far as I know, the book was close to completion, but I don't think he'd actually finished it. But that doesn't mean someone else won't. You might be wise to talk to your lawyers.”

I could tell that we'd gone just about as far in one conversation as I could logically expect to go. Dinsmore's cage had been rattled thoroughly, and I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. As we got out of our chairs, I tried to think of a way to approach the possibility of our talking again after he—and I—had had a chance to digest everything we'd just covered. I was a little surprised when he mentioned it first.

“I still can't believe all this is happening,” he said as I walked him to the door. “But I do want to know anything you might find out about Denny's whereabouts, or if you learn anything at all about Jim's or Mike's deaths.”

He paused, as we shook hands and looked at me intently. “I have no reason to hope I might rely on you not to make things worse—if that were possible—but I have very little choice, and you have no idea what all is at stake here.”

Actually, I did have a very good idea. I assured him again that it was not my intention to cause him any more trouble than was already looming over his head, and that I wasn't the slightest bit interested in what rocks Tony T. Tunderew had been planning to turn over (except for those under which there were dead people). I did make it clear that I
was
interested in exactly what was going on and intended to find out with his help or without it.

“Whatever I can do,” he said as we released our handshake and I opened the door.

As the door closed behind him, I was already making plans to somehow speak to Barbara Dinsmore and probably to her brother, Residents' Administrator Mel Hooper, as well.

I called Evergreens to tell Jonathan I was on my way, turned out the lights, and left the office.

*

Jonathan was pretty quiet on the way to Rosevine, the cemetery where the city's crematorium was located. When it was founded back in the late 1880s, Rosevine had been on the far outskirts of the city, which had slowly flowed around it and moved ever outward, leaving it an oasis of calm, green, and quiet in the midst of the city's sprawl. It had some magnificent old trees, which had survived while its neighbors beyond the cemetery's wrought iron gates were cut down to make room for houses and parking lots and mini-marts and pizza parlors.

The crematorium sat in the middle of the cemetery—a large, solid, ornate fortress-like building of rough stone. Its Victorian exterior belied the fact that its interior had recently been totally renovated to make it state of the art for the prompt and efficient reduction of human bodies to a small pile of ashes.